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In 1990/91, survey responses were gathered from 621 independent businesses located in Great Britain. A follow‐on telephone survey was conducted with 150 surviving firms in 1997. This survey gathered information surrounding the propensity of firms to export their goods or services abroad as well as other performance and goal outcomes. Organizational and external environmental variables collected in 1990 are used to explain within a multivariate statistical framework the propensity of a firm to be an exporter in 1997, and the intensity of internationalization activity. Data collected in 1990 is also used to explain variations in several performance variables (i.e. whether exporting was regarded as a path to firm growth; profit performance reported in 1997 relative to competition; and the propensity to report employment growth over the 1990 to 1997 period).

Cognition has always been central to the popular way of thinking about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs imagine a different future. They envision or discover new products or services. They perceive or recognize opportunities. They assess risk, and figure out how to profit from it. They identify possible new combinations of resources. Common to all of these is the individual’s use of their perceptual and reasoning skills, what we call cognition, a term borrowed from the psychologists’ lexicon.

This study explores whether there are differences between established “rural” and “urban” SMEs with regard to the decision to sell goods or services abroad. Several hypotheses were formulated and tested. In 1990/1991, survey responses were gathered from 621 independent businesses located in the UK. In 1997, a follow‐on telephone survey was conducted with 150 surviving firms. Urban exporting SMEs reported superior performance to urban non‐exporting SMEs in 1997. Rural and urban SMEs, however, did not significantly differ from each other with regard to the reasons cited for not exporting, the reasons cited for exporting, and the modes of entry into the largest current foreign market selected by exporters. Nevertheless, some rural SMEs had circumvented local resource constraints and entered foreign markets by engaging in networking. Implications for policy‐makers, practitioners and researchers are highlighted.

Although it has been argued that overconfidence can lead to failure (Hayward et al., forthcoming), business failure can undermine assumptions about the self that are integral to (1) confidence in one's decision-making accuracy and (2) the motivation to engage in tasks.

Evidence suggests habitual entrepreneurs (i.e. those with prior business ownership experience) are a widespread phenomenon. Appreciation of the existence of multiple entrepreneurial acts gives rise to the need to examine differences between habitual and novice entrepreneurs (i.e. those with no prior business experience as a founder, inheritor or purchaser of a business). This paper synthesizes human capital and cognitive perspectives to highlight behavioral differences between habitual and novice entrepreneurs. Issues relating to opportunity identification and information search, opportunity exploitation and learning are discussed. Avenues for future research are highlighted.

Book review by William H. A. Johnson. Casson, Mark et al., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurship, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 9780199288984

The purpose of this paper is to understand firm‐level entrepreneurship in diverse organizational contexts and explain its relationship with organizational factors.

The paper adopts a multiple‐case research design. In‐depth interviews are conducted with key informants in four cases. In each case, a firm‐level entrepreneurial story is focused on to understand the entrepreneurial process within its organizational context.

The findings show that there are two types of entrepreneurial activities in organizations – beyond‐boundary focus and within‐boundary focus. They exhibit different patterns regarding their relationship with organizational factors – top management leadership, strategic orientation, organizational culture, internal mechanisms and organizational performance.

Generalizability of the results may be limited due to the case study design of this research.

Top management leadership has a vital role in influencing entrepreneurial activity in organizations. When an organizational environment that favours entrepreneurship is supported by top management, then business‐level entrepreneurial activities are cultivated across the company. But if the organizational environment does not favour entrepreneurship, then entrepreneurial activity is mostly limited to the corporate level and only initiated by top management.

The multiple case analyses provide an extensive analysis of the organizational context and firm‐level entrepreneurship. Additionally, the emergent categories of two different types of entrepreneurial activities serve as a major and relevant step to reduce the ambiguity present in the field of study.